Ian's Blog

  There are moments when I sit down, look at the state of this country, and ask myself a simple question: when did we start accepting this as normal? When did we become a nation that watches politicians enter office with modest means and leave with fortunes that cannot be explained? When did we become comfortable watching public projects stall, hospitals run out of medicine, roads collapse, floods destroy homes and kill, and still allow leaders to walk away untouched and in most cases wealthier than before? Somewhere along the way, we developed a strange tolerance for public theft. Not approval, of course. Kenyans complain loudly. We argue online. We shake our heads at the news. But in the end, the system rarely forces anyone to return what was lost. And that is the real problem. Because public money is not theoretical. It is not numbers on paper. It is money collected from the daily struggle of ordinary Kenyans. It is deducted from salaries before people even touch their earnings....

  A bar opens next to a church. The church, disturbed by the noise, the traffic, and perhaps the symbolism of alcohol flourishing beside a place of worship, begins praying daily against the business. Quiet, persistent prayer, offered with the confidence that heaven listens. Then one day lightning strikes. The bar catches fire and burns to ashes. Immediately, the bar owner reaches a startling conclusion: this was no ordinary accident. He believes the prayers worked. In fact, he believes so strongly in the power of those prayers that he drags the church to court, insisting the priests are responsible for the destruction of his business. The church, faced with the lawsuit, quickly distances itself from any spiritual credit. Suddenly, prayer becomes symbolic rather than effective. The priests deny responsibility entirely. Lightning, they argue, is weather. Fire is accident. Prayer, apparently, had nothing to do with it. The judge proceeds to say: This is a difficult case because here w...

  Part I: What the Gen Z Protests Were Really Saying When young Kenyans took to the streets during the Gen Z demonstrations, one of the most common misunderstandings—sometimes deliberate, sometimes careless—was the belief that they were simply being disruptive. To some sections of society, especially among the comfortable middle class, the protests were first experienced through traffic jams, delayed meetings, closed businesses, missed appointments, and interrupted routines. The complaint came quickly: Why are they disturbing normal life? Why destroy business? Why not protest quietly? But that question missed the point entirely. The demonstrations were not born out of boredom, rebellion for its own sake, or a desire to inconvenience others. They were born out of accumulated frustration from a generation that has grown up watching public theft become normal, police violence become familiar, and leadership increasingly detached from the weight citizens carry every day. Young people w...

  There are moments in public life when leadership reveals itself not through policy, not through vision, not through courage, but through conduct. And sometimes that conduct says more about the state of a nation than any speech ever could. What unfolded recently between William Ruto and Rigathi Gachagua was one of those moments—deeply revealing, deeply unsettling, and for many Kenyans, deeply embarrassing. Part I: When National Leaders Descend into Public Spectacle A president and his former deputy are not ordinary political actors. Whether they agree or disagree, whether they are allies or rivals, they carry offices that symbolize the seriousness of statehood. Their words shape political culture. Their tone influences public discourse. Their conduct teaches citizens what leadership looks like. That is why watching the two spend public time exchanging insults, body-shaming one another, and reducing national conversation to personal attacks felt so jarring. Instead of debating po...

  Sometimes I catch myself wishing I had been born earlier. Not because the past was perfect, every era had its wars, its injustices, its struggles—but because earlier generations seemed to possess something we are quietly losing: time. Not just time in the sense of hours in a day, but time in the way the world moved, in the way life unfolded at a human pace. Bad news used to travel slowly, and mainly in a newspaper. A crisis might unfold somewhere far away, but it would take days or weeks before the details reached ordinary people. By the time the fear arrived, half the story had already resolved itself. That distance created a kind of psychological buffer. The world was still heavy, still complicated, but it did not press against your mind every waking moment. Today, there is no buffer. Wars update in real time. Missiles launch and within seconds the videos are on your phone. A flood happens across the city and you watch it swallow streets while you sit at your desk. A crisis unf...

One of the most powerful tools for understanding society is surprisingly simple: ask who benefits. When systems change, when institutions weaken, when social norms shift dramatically, the question of benefit often reveals motivations that are otherwise hidden beneath layers of rhetoric and ideology. In recent decades, one of the most significant social transformations across much of the world has been the weakening of the traditional family structure. Divorce rates rose sharply in many countries through the late twentieth century. Marriage rates declined. More people live alone. Dual-income households have become the norm rather than the exception. Cultural narratives around work, success, and independence have also changed dramatically. These shifts have sparked an ongoing debate: were they simply the result of evolving social values and economic realities, or did powerful institutions have incentives to encourage them? For many critics of modern economic systems, the answer seems ...

  In theory, paying taxes is one of the clearest expressions of citizenship. It is the agreement between the people and the state: citizens contribute a portion of their earnings, and in return the government provides services, infrastructure, security, education, healthcare, and a functioning society. Taxes are supposed to be the fuel that powers a nation forward. But in Kenya today, many citizens feel something very different when they look at their payslips or send money to the tax authority. Instead of feeling like they are contributing to the common good, it increasingly feels like they are funding criminals. And for many people, it doesn’t just feel like that. It looks like that. The frustration comes from the growing perception that the political class has transformed public office into one of the most lucrative criminal enterprises in the country. Instead of serving the public, many politicians appear to treat government as a private business, one where the product being s...

  Epstein files, war in the Middle East, US, Israel, Iran, drones striking, missiles fired, civilians killed—kids, babies, families. Nuclear talk everywhere. Flash floods in Nairobi swallowing homes, drowning colleagues, washing away livelihoods. Corruption unchecked, looters laughing, government promises evaporating. Family struggling to pay rent. Friend posting about suicidal thoughts. Social media pings with “breaking news” every few seconds: famine, displacement, climate disasters, police brutality, school shootings. And still, I wake up. Brush my teeth. Make coffee. Prepare for Monday. The world burns around me, but my alarm clock insists on its own urgency. I check emails, attend meetings, nod at colleagues, answer calls, pretend the chaos in Syria, Iran, Sudan, Congo, and Gaza is somehow distant enough to ignore. But it’s not distant. It’s on the screen, in the notifications, in my heartbeat. It presses on my mind. Every headline is a weight: another child dead, another fami...

  There are many things that threaten a nation: corruption, poverty, violence, and injustice. These problems dominate headlines and political debates. But beneath all of them lies something even more dangerous, something quieter and harder to confront. The most deadly poison of our time is indifference. Indifference does not arrive with noise or spectacle. It creeps in slowly, disguising itself as fatigue, resignation, or survival. It begins when people see wrongdoing and shrug their shoulders. It grows when citizens hear of corruption and say, “That’s just how things are.” Over time, indifference becomes the silent force that allows injustice to flourish unchecked. In Kenya today, this poison has seeped into many corners of national life, weakening the moral backbone that a functioning society requires. Consider how often stories of wrongdoing surface in the country. Scandals involving public funds appear with alarming frequency. Investigations are announced, commissions are forme...

  In many societies today, conversations about suicide are still surrounded by fear, silence, and misunderstanding. The topic often triggers immediate alarm, moral judgment, or institutional responses that focus more on containment than understanding. Yet one idea has been gaining traction among mental health advocates: if we want to genuinely help people who are struggling with suicidal thoughts, we must first make it safe for them to talk about those thoughts openly. That means creating spaces where individuals especially young people can have real, judgment-free conversations about their feelings without immediately being labeled, dismissed, or automatically forced into hospitalization. The premise behind this approach is simple but profound. When someone expresses suicidal thoughts, what they are often seeking first is understanding. They want someone to listen without panic, accusation, or dismissal. Unfortunately, the reaction they frequently encounter is the opposite. People...

  Every so often, a story emerges that forces us to rethink what justice should look like. One such story comes from the United States, where a grandmother in the state of Missouri is advocating for a proposal known as Bentley’s Law. The law is named after her grandsons, Bentley and Mason, whose parents and baby sibling were killed in a drunk-driving crash in 2021. In the aftermath of unimaginable loss, the grandmother began pushing for a policy that would ensure children left behind by such tragedies receive financial support from the person responsible. Bentley’s Law proposes something simple: if a drunk driver causes the death of a parent, they should be legally required to pay child support to the surviving children. Under the proposal, payments would begin about a year after the offender is released from prison and would continue until the child turns eighteen, or up to twenty-one if the child is still in school.  At its core, the proposal is built on a basic principle: a...

  During the weekend I saw an image that has refused to leave my mind. A group of about ten people were walking through floodwater that had risen to their necks in Nairobi, a sad sight indeed. They moved slowly, carefully, in formation, each person holding the hand of the next so that no one would fall or drift away. In that moment, survival depended on unity. No one was asking huyu ni tribe gani? No one cared whether the person beside them came from the mountain, the lake region, the coast, or the north. What mattered was simple and immediate: we get through this together, or we don’t get through it at all. It was a powerful reminder of something deeply true about Kenya. When crisis strikes when floods rise, when accidents happen, when tragedy hits a community, Kenyans instinctively come together. In those moments, we remember something fundamental: that we are human beings first. We help strangers push cars out of flooded roads. We contribute money for hospital bills through ha...

  There is a quiet danger in the Kenyan society that refuses to recognize patterns. Events come and go, scandals erupt and fade, promises are made and broken, yet the cycle continues almost unchanged. The faces in power may shift, the language of politics may evolve, but the outcomes remain eerily familiar. In Kenya, this inability to recognize patterns, question systems, and act on what may seal our fate for more decades to come. For decades, Kenyans have witnessed the same political script unfold with remarkable consistency. Elections arrive with grand promises of reform and transformation. Candidates present themselves as saviors ready to dismantle corruption, revive the economy, and uplift the ordinary citizen. Campaigns are filled with energy, slogans, and hopeful rhetoric. Yet once power is secured, the familiar patterns re-emerge: public funds disappear, accountability fades, and policies that should serve the public are quietly reshaped to benefit the political class. The t...

  Chinua Achebe said,  You’ll have what is good for you and I will have what is good for me. Let the kite perch, and let the eagle perch too. If one says no to the other, let his wings break.  In those simple lines lies a philosophy of justice and coexistence. Achebe reminds us that a healthy society is one where everyone has space to live, grow, and survive. The powerful do not monopolize opportunity, and the weak are not pushed out of the sky. But when greed takes over, this balance collapses. The eagle begins to believe the entire sky belongs to it. This imbalance is not abstract; it has real, devastating consequences. Across many nations, political leadership has drifted from stewardship to self-enrichment. Public office, once meant to serve citizens, has increasingly become a pathway to wealth accumulation. When politicians place personal gain above public welfare, the damage spreads across every aspect of society, education, healthcare, infrastructure, and even the...